Names of script-writer(s) and other credited author(s)

Names of composers

Numbers of performers

Financial information

Object of any funds raised

Linked occasion

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Audience information

Grandstand: Yes

Grandstand capacity:
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Total audience:
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Prices of admission and seats: highest–lowest

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Associated events

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Pageant outline

Prologue

As the audience gathers, the arena is occupied by a flock of sheep. Presently, they are driven away, and a Woodman appears. This Woodman is the narrator, and he speaks between each episode, sometimes visible, sometimes behind the scenes, to link up the action. The Woodman greets them: ‘What shall we show you; History? Yes, but the history of a village lost in the woods. Do not expect great deeds and grand people here. Lords and ladies, warriors and priests will pass, but this is not their home, they will pass like the leaves in autumn, but the trees remain.’1

Episode I. From Briton to Norman

When the Woodman has finished his Prologue, Ancient Britons appear, collecting firewood and engaged in hunting. 'The Romans, the Romans', they suddenly cry, whereupon the Roman legions enter, take possession, and make themselves at home. Soldiers, formed into a line, symbolise the straight Roman Road. Then the bugle sounds retreat, and the Romans retire to Rome. The Saxon invasion follows. The Saxons and Romanised Britons are hostile to each other at first, then fraternise. A priest arrives; Christianity is established. The Saxon leader moves with his men into battle, while the women await the event. He is brought back dead. The priest comforts the mourners. Finally the Normans enter with triumphant music. Grouping themselves round a Saxon scribe, they make the Domesday Survey and the episode closes.

Episode II. The Middle Ages

Scene I. King John at Paddington

Before the Manor House of Paddington in the year 1210. Lady de Braose urges her husband to depart before the King's vengeance falls. His horse is ready saddled. He refuses to leave. Then, from the trees, comes Avice Wykchn, the outlaw, dressed in green. Out of gratitude to the house which has sheltered him, he brings warnings that the King himself is approaching. De Braose now takes leave of his wife and two sons and rides away. The villagers beg his wife to hide. She refuses. She and her elder son remain to confront the King, but the younger son, Giles, is taken away into safety. Enter the King and his train. Enraged at the escape of de Braose, he seizes Lady de Braose and her son, carrying them away to their death. Giles, the younger son, will appear in the next scene as a novice, and in after years he will become Bishop of Hereford and be installed as Lord of the Manor of Paddington in his father's place.

Scene II. Stephen Langton at Abinger Church

The villagers wait for their beloved Archbishop. Pilgrims from
Canterbury approach, having deviated from the Pilgrims' Way, which runs
across the north of the parish. They are the types shown by Chaucer in
his Canterbury Tales and include the Knight, Squire, Yeoman,
Prioress, Man of Law, Franklin or Freeholder, Webbe or Weaver, Cook,
Shipman, Wife of Bath, Parson and Pardoner. These pilgrims bring news of
the Archbishop's approach. Children play in the courtyard of the manor;
there is a mock tournament on hobby-horses and a miracle play on a
cart. The Archbishop is seen in the distance, accompanied by a single
novice, who is Giles de Braose of Paddington. Before they arrive, the
unpopular Bishop of Winchester appears with his monks; he converses with
a crusader, since he will himself soon be going on a crusade. Finally,
the Archbishop comes and is received with joy. He and the Bishop greet
one another distantly. A procession is formed and all start for the
church, led by the monks, who sing a Latin Chant in plainsong,
appropriate to the dedication of a building. The first verse celebrates
the Heavenly Jerusalem, the celestial model of all earthly churches; the
second gives glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The
entire company enter the church and the episode closes.

Episode III. The Hammer Forge

Hammers Green 1588. A Surrey-Sussex Smiths’ folk-song, ‘Twankydillo’ is sung off-stage. Charcoal-burners, apprentices, etc., enter, small boys play, and a lady of position walks about. Enter Lord Abergavenny's steward with a man who is dragged to the whipping-post in spite of the protests of the villagers and the intercession of the Rev. Richard Dean, the Rector. A hunting-horn is heard, and Abergavenny himself arrives and has the man released. Quickly on this comes the news of the defeat of the Armada and general rejoicing. There is a country dance, ‘Gathering Peascods’, and the scene closes to the strains of ‘Twankydillo’ and the building of a bonfire. The Woodman talks about the troubled times of the seventeenth century.

Episode IV. The Days of John Evelyn, 1643 to 1660

As the scene opens, two villagers are about to be married by the Rector, the Rev. Anthony Smith, but the Puritans prevent them from entering the church and marry them at a table instead, much to their bewilderment. The Rector is deprived of his living, and the Puritans and the villagers, now in black, sing the old metrical version of the 68th Psalm. While they are singing, a solitary horseman—John Evelyn—rides slowly across the stage. When the Psalm is over, there is a sudden change in the music to symbolize the Restoration of Charles II, and the villagers, glad enough of the change, throw off their black cloaks and reappear in colours. They sing a song (‘Here’s a health unto His Majesty’) and follow with a country dance (‘The Triumph’) during which the genuine Puritans retire. At the end of the dance they form an aisle up to the church. It is a second wedding. The Rev. Stephen Geree is now Rector of Abinger, and his daughter Elizabeth is marrying Mr Francis Hammond from London. The procession comes down the aisle, followed by guests, among whom are George Evelyn of Wotton and his second wife, Lady Cotton, as well as John Evelyn and his wife. There is another country dance, ‘Haste to the Wedding’. When it is over, a gardener hands John Evelyn a small tree. He goes out to plant it in commemoration of the glad event.

Episode V. Smugglers and Other Gentry

Outside the Inn at Abinger Hatch on a summer's day about the year 1760. Scenes of village life. A young woman (Mrs John Lane) moves over the bridge and watches. Then the smugglers gallop on and unload their casks. Excise men appear and the casks are hidden by various devices, but when all seems safe, the excise men reappear. John Lane is arrested and taken off, to be deported. The casks are now opened, the neighbourhood of the Hatch Inn becomes gay, and ‘I'm Seventeen Come Sunday’ is sung. A psalm of dedication is sung, as in the days of Stephen Langton, and then (as happens in a dream) all the characters re-enter and vanish.

Episode VI. Towards Our Own Times

Outside Abinger church, during the nineteenth century. The stocks are being repaired. An Eton boy and a village boy squabble, and the steward puts the village boy into the stocks. Dr Riccabocca releases him and experiments with the stocks himself until he cannot get out. The steward comes out of church with the squire and is much surprised. Meanwhile, the rector arrives, with the farmers who are presenting a new porch to the church. They look at plans and sing verses of the 84th Psalm. Persons of ‘quality’ now begin to arrive. Rousseau and his lady are actually stopping with Mr Malthus at Westcott, but Mr Spence is responsible for them in Abinger. The Countess of Donegal drives on last. There is an entertainment of Morris dances and other country dances. Meanwhile, the Curate of Abinger, who has a taste for philosophy, tries to have a little interesting talk with Rousseau. This ends badly, for Rousseau mistakes the curate for a French spy, and finally dashes off in terror, to the concern of Mr Spence. The gentry leave, and the villagers have another drink, striking up the Surrey Folk Song ‘The Sweet Nightingale’.

The Epilogue

The Woodman proclaims:

‘Houses, houses, houses! You came from them and you must go back to them. Houses and bungalows, hotels, restaurants and flats, arterial roads, by-passes, petrol pumps, and pylons—are these going to be England? Are these man's final triumph? Or is there another England, green and eternal, which will outlast them? I cannot tell you, I am only the Woodman, but this land is yours, and you can make it what you will. If you want to ruin our Surrey fields and woodlands it is easy to do, very easy, and if you want to save them they can be saved. Look into your hearts and look into the past, and remember that all this beauty is a gift which you can never replace, which no money can buy, which no cleverness can refashion. You can make a town, you can make a desert, you can even make a garden; but you can never, never make the country, because it was made by Time. Centuries of life amongst obscure trees and unnoticed fields! That is all our pageant has tried to show you, and it will end as it began among country sights and sounds. Farewell! And take back its lesson with you to your houses, for it has a lesson. Our village and our woods bid you farewell.’

At the end of the epilogue, the arena is again filled with sheep.

Key historical figures mentioned

John (1167–1216) king of England, and lord of Ireland, duke of Normandy and of Aquitaine, and count of Anjou

Newspaper coverage of pageant

Book of words

Forster, E.M. The Pageant of Abinger. London, 1934.

There are many reprints of this, beginning with Abinger Harvest (Harmondsworth, 1936, a collection of essays, with the text of the pageant). See also the Abinger Edition of E.M. Forster, ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London, 1972).

A copy of the book of words is available at the St James’ Church, Abinger, website, accessed 10 June 2016, http://www.stjameschurchabinger.org/GetFile.aspx?File=%2fDocuments%2fAbinger%20Pageant%201934.pdf.

Wiener, Martin J. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980. Cambridge, 1981. At 76.

This list is necessarily incomplete given the amount of literature on Forster and Vaughan Williams.

Archival holdings connected to pageant

Surrey History Centre, Woking:

Book of words and cast list. 6536/35.

Papers of Anne L. Farrer relating to the Abinger Pageant, including memos, correspondence, cuttings and original scores by Ralph Vaughan Williams. 8852.

Scrapbook relating to Abinger Hammer. 19497744/1.

King’s College Library, Cambridge University:

Copies of scrapbooks and photographs relating to the Abinger Pageant. Kings/PP/EMF/9/5/1–2.

Sources used in preparation of pageant

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Canterbury Tales.

The Diary of John Evelyn.

Summary

The Abinger Pageant is probably the most written-about pageant due to the two figures behind its creation, E.M. Forster and Ralph Vaughan Williams. In discussing this pageant, the literature has tended to do two things. First, it has compared it to the successor pageant produced by Forster and Vaughan Williams, England’s Pleasant Land (1938), considering these pageants in the light of the literary and modernist vogue for pageant plays in the 1930s which found its expression in T.S. Eliot’s The Rock(1934) and Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts (1940). On the basis of this, Jed Esty has made a claim for the diminishing horizons of late English modernist literature during this period, arguing that it retreated from the imperialist and internationalist settings of earlier works into a search for a lost ‘deep’ England of the countryside that was threatened by the expansion of cities, the motor car and technology. Thus modernism, according to Esty (supported by Martin Wiener), joined forces with the earlier genre of romantic criticism of the Industrial Revolution from William Cobbett and S.T. Coleridge through to the Victorian jeremiads of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and William Morris.2 There is much to commend this thesis, and it is certainly true that both Forster and Vaughan Williams were deeply sympathetic to the rural preservationist movements of the National Trust and the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE). Vaughan Williams’s music for the pageant was derived largely from English folk songs recorded by Cecil Sharp, A.L. Lloyd and others. (That said, whether or not preservationism or the folk movement be described as opposed to ‘modernity’ tout court is an open question, as the sensitive work of David Matless has shown.3)

Secondly, the Abinger Pageant has been treated almost entirely as a work of literature, in particular with reference to Forster’s England’s Pleasant Land, which is a much more radical and polemical pageant, and one that deliberately plays with the pageant form. By contrast, the Abinger Pageant is more straightforward and conforms with many traditions of inter-war pageants, celebrating the English past for its own sake and telling the story of a sleepy English village. Despite this, the foreword to the book of words stressed that ‘it is rural rather than historical and tries to show the continuity of country life’.4 Only the Epilogue, spoken by the Woodman, which concludes the pageant, is directed against suburbanisation and the building of roads (the text here seemingly heavily influenced by Clough Williams-Ellis’s England and the Octopus [1928]). In fact, the first episode, relating to the Hammer Forge (which gave Abinger Hammer its name), makes no attempt to link an early proto-industrial smelting operation to the wider encroachment of industrial modernity. Furthermore, the sixth episode makes no reference to Malthus’s dismal predictions about population, which would subsequently influence the New Poor Law of 1834, or Rousseau’s own preference for a romantic return to nature over corrupt civilisation. Rousseau’s growing persecution mania is merely played for laughs.

While the use of a narrator or compère in pageants (here, in the figure of the Woodman) was at this time far less common than it would become in the post-war era, it was not unheard of. The Antiquities of Selborne(1926), written by Mary Kelly (which is stylistically and structurally similar and which Forster may well have used as a model), features dialogue between Gilbert White and John Mulso, between each scene.5 The rest of the Abinger pageant, while somewhat more literary than the standard pageant, conforms to standard tropes. The first scene compresses the invasions of Britain successively by the Romans, Saxons and, finally, Normans. The pageant likewise celebrates prominent moments from the history of the locality, with plenty of interludes with festivals, revelries and dancing.

The pageant was, like many others, conceived with the intention of raising money for the local parish church. The idea of bringing together Abinger’s most prominent resident (Forster) and most prominent native (Vaughan Williams) was clearly with an eye to the increased publicity and audiences that this would likely attract. A number of other pageants had used prominent writers to write scenes, including Arthur Quiller Couch and Henry Newbolt at Winchester (1908), Rudyard Kipling at the Festival of Empire Pageant (1924), and A.L. Rowse and John Buchan in the Pageant of Oxfordshire (1931). Indeed, T.S. Eliot was also commissioned to write The Rock (1934). It was uncommon, however, for a major author to write the script for an entire pageant, just as it was rare for a relatively small scale pageant like Abinger to have music by England’s greatest living composer. Vaughan Williams had grown up nearby, at Leith Hill Place, and Forster had lived at West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, since 1925. The pageant committee was particularly press-savvy and willing to exploit their talents. Catherine E. Marshall, secretary for the committee, sent a large number of copies of the script to national newspapers, as well as to the National Trust and the CPRE, with an attached memo outlining three types of people interested in the pageant:

1. To visitors from abroad and from the British Dominions overseas because it will represent typical and picturesque scenes of English country life from pre-Roman times up to the 19th century.

2. To those interested in preserving the beauty and the native occupations of our countryside, for which the Epilogue spoken by the Woodman makes an eloquent appeal.

3. To those who believe that history does not depend for its interest on battles and victories, but on the cultural development of the people and the colour and drama in their daily lives. Our local story has no battles later than Norman times and does not rely for its effects on any impressive military display.6

This gambit was successful, as the pageant was indeed covered widely in the national press. The Times publicised the event beforehand: ‘The life of a village, it has been said, is the life of a nation in miniature, and it is upon this saying that the villagers of Abinger, in Surrey, have based their pageant which is to be given in the Old Rectory on Saturday afternoon and Wednesday evening, July 14 and 18.’7 The Observer remarked that ‘to those interested in preserving the beauty and the native occupations of the English countryside, the Pageant of Abinger… should make an insistent appeal’.8 The Spectator went so far as to supply an entire article about the book of words before the event, noting Forster’s ‘semi-pagan tree motif’, which had featured in a number of his other works. The writer went on:

I am not surprised to learn that in this case, for the whole period between 1066 and today, there has been no recourse to the all too familiar battles and military displays. That is not, I suppose, because the promoters of this pageant are exceptionally pacifist, but because they have discovered so many other things in the past local life of their beautiful district which are more characteristic and interesting. The Woodman in the Epilogue does not omit to point the moral that it ‘is easy to ruin our Surrey fields and woodlands’, but ‘if you want to save them they can be saved’.9

After the first performance, The Times also noted the that ‘the dominant theme was trees’, pointing out, with subtle irony, that ‘it was perhaps a just beginning that motorists had to abandon their cars and walk a long way upon leaf-mould paths between trees to reach the old rectory hollow where the pageant was presented’. The paper approvingly noted that ‘the affair was not theatrical, but depended on various kinds of natural effects. The players enacting the tale of a village were mostly the villagers themselves. And animals were prominent entertainers also.’10 The paper particularly enjoyed the ‘thirteenth century scene, done on a miniature scale by children, who look like figures from a Breughel [Bruegel]’.11 It ‘was the better sort of pageant; and the audience, for one thing, was impressed by the charming and serious children who acted in it. Yet, for all its country dancing and humour, the total effect was touching. Could the sunny trees, within whose circle we sat, withstand for long those influences of the time which are alien to these gentle players.’12

It is precisely the understatement of its message, cloaked in aspects of pure pageantry, that has encouraged commentators to look for a deeper meaning in the pageant. Unlike so many pageanteers, Forster and Tom Harrison, a local resident and the pageant master whose idea the event had been, realised that less is more. The Spectator, which seldom covered pageants, was glowing in its praise:

Abinger did its pageant last Saturday extremely well. Mr E.M. Forster, experimenting confidently in a medium new (I believe) to him, worked a threat of continuity with marked success through a series of what might otherwise have been disjointed episodes, and a perfect arena with its wooded background and a. natural parterre for the audience would have won applause even for a mediocre programme. Actually there was nothing mediocre about a single scene.13

The journal was effusive about everything, including the ‘sheep found grazing on the herbage of the natural stage of the pageant’. The Spectator went on to revel in ‘the fine democracy which associated every class—literally from peer to plumber, and in particular the children of the hall and the children of the cottage—in a performance notable for the ambition of its endeavour and the zest of its achievement’ and which ‘showed a typical English village at its best.’14

The most significant and perceptive review of the pageant came from the New Statesman and Nation, a journal which—like the Spectator —generally saw pageants as beneath its dignity. Its review is worth reproducing in full:

[S]ince that disintegrating earthquake, the Industrial Revolution, the great gulf fixed between the mass of the people and the best artists of the time has been continually widening. Attempts to bridge it are always being made, ranging from futile art-and-craftiness to the wiser programmes of the B.B.C. and those excellent posters like those used by Shell-Mex and the Underground. Recently we had the curious spectacle of a Church pageant written by Mr T.S. Eliot, but Church pageants are not exactly proletarian entertainments. The pageant which was given in the Surrey village of Abinger on the 14th and 18th of this month is a more genuinely popular affair, because it is entirely the production of people on the spot, mostly farmers and cottagers. Among them happens to be two of our most distinguished artists, Dr Vaughan Williams and Mr E.M. Forster, who have written the music and the narration.

Chaotic industry has made large sections of the Midlands and North of England first an inferno and then a desert. One can imagine new towns arising there, places worthy of human beings, and round them the Black Country becoming green again. This appears a dream, but is it so much more improbable than the actual nightmare?15

All things considered, the pageant was a huge success, with the chairman of the Executive Committee, Lady Denny, writing in the August edition of the Abinger Parish Magazine that the pageant had ‘been a success succeeding all expectations...[it] provided a striking spectacle and brought in a large amount of money. It succeeded in a wider and even more important way—in the bringing together of hundreds of people, of all ages, ranks and classes, to work together with enthusiasm and good fellowship.’16 She hoped that its spirit would ‘become a permanent contribution to the religious and social life of our parish, and that the sentiments which the pageant was bound to evoke in Abinger people may arouse or increase that spirit of local patriotism, which is, on a smaller scale, as sacred and precious a thing as the love which we bear our country.’17 Among many illustrious guests were the novelist Rebecca West and the poet R.C. Trevelyan.

The success of the pageant inspired Forster, Harrison and Vaughan Williams to put on a further pageant, England’s Pleasant Land (1938). Tom Harrison went on to become the Regional Officer for the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (the forerunner to the Arts’ Council) in the Midlands, an organisation that was vital to the cultural renaissance experienced by Britain in the years after the Second World War.18 He staged further pageants, including the Coventry Cathedral Pageant (1945), performed in the bombed out ruins. Forster was forced to leave Abinger in 1946 after the lease on his house expired (uncannily mirroring a sub-plot in Howard’s End [1910]).

As it turned out, in the years after the pageant Abinger was not so much under threat from property developers and the spread of bricks and mortar, as from the wider European situation, the Second World War breaking out just five years later. On 3 August 1944 Abinger church suffered an indirect hit from a flying bomb, which destroyed the belfry, the nave and parts of the walls, as well as gutting the interior. After long delays due to a lack of building materials in the context of post-war austerity, restoration was finally begun in 1951.19 The people of Abinger could think of no better way of raising funds for its restoration than holding a Pageant of Sport (1952), which raised £500.20

Footnotes

^ Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations in synopses are taken from E.M. Forster, The Pageant of Abinger (London, 1934).